Thursday, November 3, 2011

Day 1471 - Happiest Place at Westfield Mall?

This past weekend, our local mall had the grand opening of Emma and Andrew's favorite store. No, not those Sleep Number stores with their trademarked Select Comfort mattresses. We are talking about the Disney Store. For the past two months, the Disney Store was being remodeled into something a little fancier and cooler. And the unveiling of the improved store was this past Saturday.

Previously, the Disney Store was pretty basic: a big television screen in the back of the store, and plenty of shelves and displays of the latest Disney merchandise (i.e. Jake Gyllenthal Prince of Persia chest reproductions, Diane Lane Secretariat action figures, and Nicholas Cage National Treasure hair pieces). But the new layout has a Princess castle, a magical talking mirror, a gazebo with a large HD projection screen, and numerous other digital projections throughout the store. All you really need to enjoy this store are some kids, an imagination, and a credit card with a generous limit.

Our entire family enjoys Disney. Even before the kids were born, Lisa and I would enjoy going to the Disney theme parks and watch the latest Disney/Pixar movies in the theater. So I thought it would be fun for the kids to go to the grand opening since there would also be a photo opportunity with the characters from Toy Story. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!

But when we arrived at the mall, all I wanted to shout instead was, "Zip-a-dee-doo-what-the-f*&k-are-we-doing-here?!?" You see, there was a gigantic line to meet the characters from Toy Story. Since we already built up the experience, we got into line with all the other parental suckers and waited it out.

The wait was mind-numbing for me, but Lisa didn't mind at all. As we made our way slowly down the line, Lisa would just pop into the next clothing or shoe store and leave me with our increasingly impatient children. Here's a picture of the line after fifteen minutes of waiting; the red arrow is where we were at.

After about forty minutes of waiting and Lisa's four bags of newly bought clothes, we finally got to the front of the line. I tried to pump up the kids since they were going to meet Buzz Lightyear.

After shaking them senselessly and demanding that they enjoy this Disney experience, it was time for them to meet Buzz. Buzz gave the kids a couple of high fives, the kids laughed, and then we took this picture.

It was all over in under fifteen seconds. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean in a lot of circumstances fifteen seconds is actually a real long time. Right? I mean...I'm just saying. It's definitely not a short amount of time. Right? RIGHT?

Although I was a bit of a grump towards the end, my dark cloud lifted since the kids were excited to take the picture with Buzz. And isn't that why we as parents do what we do for our kids? We put up with these crazy situations for those mere seconds or minutes of happiness that we see on our kid's face.

But after I found out that there was another line to enter the actual store, my Eeyore cloud reappeared and I muttered, "Supercalifragilisticwhatthef*&karewedoinghere?"